You can pay employees with cash legally, but it’s a royal PITA and OP would still be “in the system” so to speak via income taxes and the like. The not-so-legal method would be for an employer to operate a cash-heavy business in which they’d basically take cash from the till and hand it directly to the employee, not recording either the income to the business or the dispersement to the employee. The issue can be that if the business doesn’t operate with much cash on hand, they’d have to basically withdraw it from the ATM to give to OP, but (depending on how the business is structured) it would likely count as a personal dispersement to the business owner that they’d be taxed on and they wouldn’t be able to claim it as a business expense, unless they did some fuckery with their books and run the risk of getting nailed by the IRS.
Yeah that’s fair, I was of the mind of the hope that we the people could possibly shift things in our direction.
The biggest hurdle in all of this is that everything is set up in a way that the most affordable and convenient options are often the worst as far as privacy, Amazon being the biggest example, groceries being another. It takes an extraordinary amount of diligence (and let’s be real, income) to be able to side skirt corporate dominance in the goods market. Services like utilities and often house are pretty much fucked unless you can manage to move somewhere more off the grid.
I think the whole point is location tracking and identification. You figure if they want to go after a group of protestors, all they do is set up their tig near them and they’ll instantly have every device in the immediate area that they can chase down. And let’s be real here, they don’t give two fucks about legality anymore, they’re in full suppression mode. All the more reason to never bring a phone to a protest in the US.
As far as I understand, RF is RF. All the truck device needs to do is operate on the same RF frequencies as the tower with the correct data form and handshakes (which I’m sure the cell companies happily provide), and boom, you’re connected.
Phones naturally connect to the strongest signal, which will be these things as long as its signal is stronger than the tower, and then the transceiver on the truck connects to the cell tower and is configured to MITM snoop as traffic is passed through the truck device on to the tower and vice versa.
And Ubiquiti’s support is non-existent. Don’t get me wrong, I like their hardware, and their software works just fine for my needs, especially at their price point. But if you have issues, you’re searching forums or are SOL.
Ruckus gear is pretty good too, though I don’t have much hands-on experience with it. And it’s expensive. Like really expensive.
Obligatory US, I think the better way of filtering bad drivers is more stringent and frequent testing through the DMV (or your state’s equivalent). Look at Germany, they don’t mess around when it comes to licensing. I’m mid 30s, and haven’t had to retest or do any form of continuing driver’s education or retesting since I was 16.
It’s a little trickier here in the US due to our cities being built for cars, and being without one can be a huge detriment, especially with most public transit being a shitshow. But I agree, we definitely need some mechanisms to weed out bad drivers.
I just bought a new truck back in December, and I feel you. Your best bet might be to find something a little on the older side with low miles that has no connectivity features whatsoever. Carmax was a great resource for this, but I still had to do a significant amount of research before doing anything. Avoid GM/GMC like the plague, OnStar is officially spyware at this point, and Ford with their Sync crap isn’t any better. Basically, avoid anything that offers LTE or WiFi capability, but also beware that even pairing Bluetooth to your car can be a breachpoint.
I’m gonna go for taking reasonable action of fortification and then try my luck.
And negative, usable security is a delicate balance of security and convenience. It employs various layers of usable redundant security methods that keep things to the best possible and reasonable level of security available, while also maintaining useful defense. If I were doing anything rendering me a target of a malicious actor, that’s a different story. But run of the mill individual passwords for each website/service coupled with 2FA along with password database encryption is enough to keep a nobody like me reasonably comfortable.
Sure, but what happens if the population explodes? Primarily server costs will go through the roof, and then you’re still relying on volunteer moderation. It works now because the fediverse is reasonably small, but a true user exodus for any major platform could overload existing instance resources. I think the saving grace here is that there is a bit of a learning curve with Lemmy that fends away the less tech savvy, but that could change in future updates
Tl;Dr: screw ISP modems. If cash is tight, go with a 3rd party router you can slap ddwrt/openwrt. If you’ve got some money and time, go with something a little more robust.
Modems aren’t really a big deal, all they really are is an interface to the cable system’s RF signaling, as well as subscription enforcement (speeds, if you paid your bill, etc). Any thing leaving your router is going to be seen by the ISP either there or at the headend, so it doesn’t really matter. They make 3rd party modems, but performance increases may be minimal.
Routers on the other hand, I wouldn’t trust their gear as far as I could throw it. Perhaps I have a tinfoil hat on, but I wouldn’t put it past them to log all traffic before it hits my VPN and phone home, let alone hold and handle my configuration correctly (looking directly at you, Spectrum). I recently got Frontier fiber and they provided an Eero router, and I don’t care for that thing (primarily because they’re owned by Amazon, and I don’t trust Amazon even more than my ISP). For my networks, I pass all traffic through a VPN on the router level so that all my ISP sees is a big blob of encrypted blah (with the exception of streaming apps, whom are isolated on their own network with very strict firewall rules and are not allowed anywhere near my trusted network, only because some get cranky when used over a VPN and they’re data vacuums). Additionally, ISP-provided routers have a tendency to lack configuration options, even port-forwarding (useful for gaming, servers, etc). Not entirely sure where your networking skills are at, but I’m guessing you might have some basic familiarity given that you’re here and asking.
Most 3rd party routers will give you better performance and configuration options than your ISPs nonsense, and maybe a better degree of privacy (though maybe not). If privacy is your concern, all your traffic needs to be encrypted out of your router through a trustworthy VPN, and steps on your local network need to be taken to ensure that traffic is handled appropriately. Do your research on the brand and company of any gear you’re looking to buy, and make sure they line up with what you’re looking for.
I haven’t messed with dd-wrt/openwrt in probably 10+ years, but they were a great option for consumer-grade hardware back in the day, and I’d hope they still are. The software simply did it’s job of routing packets and that was it, no shenanigans. There is a bit of technical knowhow involved, but their guides were great and very thorough. As long as you understand basic networking concepts, it should be reasonably straightforward to set up a basic network.
If you have the money and time to learn, I’m personally a fan of Ubiquiti (when I’m paying for it) and Ruckus (when a client/someone else is paying for it). These are much more involved networking hardware companies and there is a good sized learning curve (and cost), but if you want something to play with and a streamlined network, they’re awesome. Ubiquiti has a pretty decent wizard to get a basic network going, and from there you can mess with it at your leisure. Their Dream Machine (UDM) is a great all-in-one router/wifi AP, but it’s also almost $300, depending on your money situation.
It’s important to remember that POCOs are highly regulated, and they’re not allowed to frivolously charge whatever they feel like, even in high demand conditions (probably state-dependent, but that’s at least the case here in CA).
ML applications
What do you mean by that?
And I see where you’re coming from. At this point in the world, where just about every data point about a person/household is tabulated and used in ways to coerce you to spend more money, I just feel like this is low on the priority scale. The utilities’ motivation for smart meters is mostly labor cost reduction (meter readers). The remainder is real time grid load monitoring and statistics that better enables them to manage surge generation to keep costs down. This comes from a family friend that’s a higher up in SoCal Edison. They legit don’t care if someone is using an industrial grade sex machine or growing weed (though the municipality might). The biggest issue I can see with this, like anything else and as you alluded to, is data security/privacy.
Agreed. I remember my mom tripping out about these a while back, and so I did some digging. Precursor: I am but a humble resi/commercial/industrial electrician, not a lineman or POCO employee.
There are a couple different configurations of these meters, typically one way broadcast RF and bidirectional RF. These use the same (or similar) frequencies as cellular networks. The bidirectional meter connects to a neighborhood gateway, which then transmits back to the POCO, while the broadcast meters (like my local utility) transmit a low range signal that’s picked up a truck with a receiver driving through a neighborhood to collect usage information (and doesn’t require the meter reader to walk up to each and every meter and physically read them). These are primarily used for efficiency and labor cost reduction. Obviously, the one way broadcast meters are not being read in real time, only the meters that are connected to the POCO through a network connection.
These meters only read the overall usage in your home or business, not individual loads. They are situated in line on both phases (or all 3 in a commercial environment) between the utility feeders and your main breaker (or through a current transformer for mains that are too large for a regular meter, but it effectively does the same thing), measuring the current flowing through them, and, through Ohm’s law math (Watts=Volts*Current, Watts/1000=kW), reports usage. The only way to determine individual loads without extra equipment/monitors is through inference (which is actually pretty easy to due to the trained eye; for instance, when sizing generators, I’ll run a power monitor for a few days to a week to gather load data, and it’s fairly easy to surmise what spikes are what based on typical patterns and time of day). Some (read: very few) meters could do what’s called load shedding (aka turn things off) to reduce demand on the grid, but even the few meters that have this capability are only able to disconnect your home/business entirely. Some utilities are offering incentives to allow high-demand appliances (ie air conditioners) to be managed by the utility, but outside of using utility-connected thermostats, they would rely on a separate load management module that is directly connected to the appliances they wish to control (and only then, it would be a simple on/off; this is where thermostats are preferable, because the POCO can stop Suzie from cranking the AC down to 60 and running like a stockcar when its 115F out, and set it to 78 to bring overall demand lower while not cooking her like a holiday roast). It’s important to remember here that every single electrical appliance is physically connected to the grid via hardwire. There is no wireless electricity (for anything useful or practical pertaining to this conversation). It is possible to use powerline networking to control appliances, but that would require these appliances to be equipped with a communications module to respond. Electricity is pretty dumb; it flows wherever there’s a free path of travel.
Also, there is no benefit to the POCO for turning any of your stuff on and off aside from load management for the wider grid. If anything, they’d prefer you using electricity that they can then charge you for.
The only real concern I could see with these is a nefarious actor having access to your real-time usage to determine your habits. I guess the argument can be made that the POCO is spying on you, but I really don’t see a benefit to them knowing your usage aside from network/grid management. Perhaps a locality can use this data to determine if you’re growing weed, but other than that, in a world where all of our information is harvested anyway, it seems pretty inconsequential to me. if you’re that concerned, get a solar/battery system and turn off your main breaker.
Any time a store asks for a phone number, I use the local area code followed by 867-5309, and 9/10 times it works